On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 11:53 PM, Matt Benson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> --- Emmanuel Bourg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > That looks interesting, this kind of structure can > > still be found today > > in ar and cpio archives used for deb and rpm > > packages. I also used this > > style of file in inter bank communications a few > > years ago. > > > > That would be awesome if the component was able to > > operate on binary > > files too, you would define the structure in a DSL > > like language and map > > it to your beans. Just dreaming :) > > Actually, there's not much reason it couldn't support > binary files. The method signatures are defined in > terms of bytes rather than chars, and unicode is > supported in the DSL's string literals (I'm aware that > the DSL stuff badly needs i18n support). It's > possible that "Flatfile" doesn't capture the potential > as well as some other name might. :| > That would be great. I even had to write parsers for fiiles in which binary data and textual data are mixed. This happened several times i worked with MQSeries. I think the API should support fixed lenght data too. Maybe there could be some implementation for a lenght field definition. With that I mean a field of 4 ints, telling you how often a structure of xy chars is repeating and so on. Chris
